by Robert Pobi
“Thanks for coming,” Lucas said to the group. “Now, grab your shit and follow me.”
He made the introductions on the way to the subterranean lab. Everyone was duly impressed with Special Agent Whitaker, and a few seconds into their walk, Lucas was certain that they’d do anything he asked of them. It was also obvious that they were aware of what had happened the night before by their body language and sideways eye contact.
“Regardless of what you saw on the news, nothing really happened last night.” And even as he said it, he realized it was the single-largest understatement he had ever made. “I’m fine, and the bad guys are dead.”
Nadeel snorted in way of a laugh. “No shit. Didn’t one guy get chopped up with a sword?”
Lucas ignored the remark and went into his disclaimer as they hit the staircase. “I need your help. Hear me out before you say yes or no, and if you walk out, I won’t hold it against you. If you stay, however, it will impact your mark in a positive way, regardless of results. Not that any of you need academic handouts, but I want you all to know that I appreciate you coming down here on Christmas and doing this.”
“Dr. Page?” Bobby said.
“Yes?”
“Could you just tell us why we’re here?” As always, the kid went for the gold.
They hit the basement level, and Lucas pushed through the doors. Then he held out his open palm, and Whitaker placed a portable hard drive in it. Lucas held the device up. “I’m back with the FBI on a consulting basis. We’ve got four people who have been killed by a sniper. The bureau’s people haven’t been able to link them in any capacity, but they are not random. What I need from you is to find out what the commonality is.”
“We’re working for the FBI?” Bobby asked. “Will we be able to put that on a résumé?”
Lucas looked over at Whitaker. She gave him a blank shrug, so Lucas answered it on his own authority. “I’ll make sure that you all get letters of reference from the senior agent in charge of the case.”
Lucas handed the hard drive to Bobby. “What you have there is the entire history of all four victims. The last victim, Atchison, is more than likely a victim of opportunity, but don’t take anything for granted—just be aware of the possibility. Everything from personnel files from their respective agencies to their credit card statements to their email passwords—absolutely everything the agency has assembled on them from the unknowable to Big Data—is in there.”
Lucas keyed them into the lab, locking the door behind them. This was the hub of the university’s brainpower, a corridor-filled underground wing that very few people got to see. The subterranean tech chamber was home to the university’s servers, the temperature- and humidity-controlled space home to massive doses of computational might. It also looked really cool.
The lab tech, a woman named Cecile Rasmussen, whom everyone simply called Raz, came over. She was dressed in a pair of jeans and a sweater that was either ironic or the ugliest thing Lucas had ever seen: a thick green shag with Rudolph emblazoned on the front in bright-colored yarn, his nose an actual red light bulb that blinked. “Raz, this is the group I called you about.”
Rasmussen opened her arms to the space, indicating that it was all theirs. “Take the big lecture monitors; Dr. Page said you’d need a lot of eyeball real estate. I set you up with enough juice to model most of the known universe. If you need me, just yell,” she said and walked off, disappearing into the maze of air-cooled corridors that snaked off to points unknown.
Lucas walked over to the corner that Rasmussen had roped off for them. “No one else is coming in here, so you’ll have the space to yourself. But I have a few caveats.”
Nadeel already had his laptop out and was slaving to the big screens. “Such as?”
“Such as you are being given very personal information on every aspect of these victims’ lives. If any of this is leaked—I mean any of it—I will consider it an ethical violation of your duties as my assistants, and you will be expelled. Beyond that, the FBI will charge you with a felony and pursue you in a criminal court. I don’t think any of you here would do that, but I have to put it on the table.”
Then, with warnings over, he went to work. “Don’t waste your time with what’s there. Look for what isn’t there. Look for the holes in the patterns.”
Bobby smiled and held up his hand. “Is that it? Or do you have more pontificating to do?”
Lucas looked at the kid for a hard second. “Three of these victims are connected somehow. Maybe all four. The bureau can’t find it, but it’s there. Besides their choice of careers, something else links these people. I want you to find it.”
Bobby plugged the hard drive into his laptop, and the five massive monitors lit up. “Do you mind if we get to work now?” he said and dropped into the zone.
As they walked away, Whitaker said, “I guess all you eggheads are like that.”
“Like what?”
“Pricks.”
Lucas ignored her and checked his watch. “We have to get back to Oscar’s.”
57
The West Village
The suited acolytes were done milling about the machine shop floor, no longer deeply immersed in their slow-motion process of blacklighting, dusting, and photographing the total environment. Most of their equipment was packed back up, and the static-free suits were bagged and put away.
Oscar’s office was exactly as it had been the day before. Except for the dead man scabbed to the chair, a tumbler of bloody scotch sitting amid red flecks on the coffee table in front of him. Oscar’s teeth were inside, the blood and booze separated into different densities, a smiling tequila sunrise.
The fire was long since dead, but the flue was open, and the wind generated a sad moan that seemed the perfect soundtrack.
Whitaker stood in front of Oscar’s chair. Lucas didn’t know much about her, and he knew absolutely nothing about Oscar except what he had witnessed the day before, but it was obvious that she was upset by his death. Her lip didn’t tremble and no tears formed in her eyes, but her movements were nowhere near as smooth as usual.
Crime-scene investigation had never been part of his job description, but he had absorbed enough of it through a natural curiosity coupled with crime-scene osmosis. The process had been refined into a science by the bureau, beginning with the larger gestalt and refining focus down to the minutiae, eventually arriving at a very specific category. And standing there, staring down at the Kafkaesque earthly vessel Oscar’s murderer had left behind, whole passages out of the FBI’s Violent Crime Investigation Manual came back to him. There was no way to miss what this was: a sadistic murder.
The bureau’s crime-scene people were there, and Whitaker summoned their lead over. His name was Denver Williams, and he was filling out his second decade with the bureau. Which meant he had the tired, bored look that anyone who spends enough time around the dead eventually develops.
“Special Agent Whitaker,” Williams said in way of a hello. He simply nodded at Lucas, probably because he didn’t remember his name from the scene the other night at Hartke’s murder. “We’ve had two separate visits here, at different times. Two individuals were present for the murder, and they tracked blood out when they left; we found it on the staircase going down, leaving traces right up to the back door. Men’s boots, large size. We’ll type them at the lab. There are no signs that any of the locks were either compromised or picked, so we have to assume that Mr. Shiner let his murderers in or that they had a key. But it’s the third set that’s odd.”
Whitaker didn’t say anything; she just listened. Lucas stood behind her, watching her body language.
Williams continued, “Sometime after the murderers left, a third person entered the building. Again, through the back door. The blood spatter left a strong and defined pattern on the carpet, and the third visitor picked up trace evidence, but it was already dry. Which meant that they were here at least three hours after the murder. Since Mr. Shiner was already dead, we have to a
ssume that this person had a key.”
“How was he killed?” Whitaker asked.
Williams nodded down at the corpse dried to the chair. “We won’t know the exact COD until the ME takes him apart, but a good guess would be that gunshot to his head punched his clock. Everything that happened before was window dressing. He died around six last night. It looks like the slug didn’t exit the body, so the ME’ll be able to give you more specifics.”
Oscar’s head was tilted to one side, and his brain was spilled all over his shoulder and down into his lap. His mouth was open, the hinge on one side of his jaw gone and burned from the muzzle blast. And the rest of the wounds said that Oscar had been visited by the angel of pain before the bullet had extinguished his life.
Lucas turned away as Whitaker and Williams talked more shop, his attention drawn to the collection of ammunition on the mantel. Shells of every conceivable size, shape, and caliber were still neatly organized. But something had changed since the last time they were here. “Whitaker,” he said, interrupting the CSI man’s monologue.
She looked up from Oscar’s body and came over.
Lucas nodded at the display of bullets. “This is not the same as yesterday.”
“What do you mean?”
“A round is missing.” Lucas aimed his green anodized finger at a point in the fence of ammunition where a shell was missing. “Two rows back—a .300 Winnie Mag.”
Whitaker was staring at the empty slot in the display when her phone rang. Without taking her eyes from the mantel, she pulled it from her pocket and answered with a curt, “Whitaker.”
She listened for a few seconds, punctuating the dead air with, “Of course,” and “Okay.” After nodding a half dozen times, she hung up and turned to Lucas. “Analysis of the ammunition we found in Atchison’s basement came back. The machining and bonding process is identical, and the tooling marks match. But the ferrous kernels they contain are not meteoric; they’re stainless steel.”
“And?” He could tell there was more by her expression.
“Kehoe wants us at the office ASAP; a French terrorist cell just released a statement claiming the shooter.”
58
26 Federal Plaza
Zeke Tran hung up the phone and clicked the cursor over the check box on the screen, connecting to the next number on the list. He was one of three agents cold-calling law enforcement agencies that didn’t have a statistical presence in reporting crimes to the bureau’s national crime database—the N-DEx.
Not that Tran believed that this was how they’d find their guy; news had already come down that it was some French asshole who had turned to the dark side. This was a monumental waste of his resources, and he would much rather be out there questioning people, taking notes, and developing theories. None of which his first-year status as a probationary agent even remotely qualified him to do.
Tran hit the automatic dial tab, and the computer connected him with the next agency on the list—a sheriff’s department in Carlwood, Wyoming. As the line connected, he scanned the bureau’s information sheet on the office, noting the size of their force and the demographics: population 5,003 souls as of last census; one sheriff; three deputies; one part-time dispatcher; average snowfall of 109 inches.
Tran could tell that the call transferred to a cell phone. It was answered with, “Sheriff’s office. How can I help you?”
Tran went into his pitch, honed over a day of cold-calling. “This is Agent Zeke Tran of the FBI. I’m calling from our field office in New York City. Who am I speaking to?”
“This is Deputy Arch Stanton.”
“Deputy Stanton, I need to speak to your CO. How can I reach him?”
There was a pause before Stanton said, “How do I know that this really is the FBI?”
This had happened at every single one of the departments Tran spoke to. Welcome to the age of paranoia—necessary paranoia. “If you check your call display and then run that number through Google—you have data in your car?”
“Yes, we do.”
“Just run the number, and it will come up as one of ours. If you prefer, you can call the New York office and ask them to transfer through to my extension. I’d understand. But it’s urgent and has to be done in the next few minutes. We’re in the midst of an investigation.”
“I heard. Nigger shooting folks.”
“We don’t have a suspect, Deputy Stanton, and I’d appreciate it if you’d not use racial epithets.”
There was a pause followed by, “Racial wha—? Oh, you mean nigger? Sorry. It ain’t a racist thing. It’s not like we’re talking about Cam Newton or anything. I just—”
Tran cut him off. “Deputy Stanton, I don’t have a lot of time. How do I reach your sheriff?”
Tran could hear Stanton typing on his console computer, the telltale clack-clack-clack of technology badly in need of an upgrade. But not all counties had the tax base for new equipment. Tran had spoken to a department earlier in the day where the sheriff’s phone line was his home number.
“You check out, Mr. Tran.” And with that, Stanton gave him the sheriff’s cell number. “Sheriff Doyle is on duty right now. If you have any trouble reaching him, just give me a call ba—”
“Thank you, Deputy Stanton,” Tran said, hung up, and dialed the sheriff’s number.
The man snapped on in one ring, his voice echoing with computer-generated wobble. “Doyle here.”
Tran went into his pitch again, wondering how many more times he’d utter the same sentence in the next few days. “Sheriff Doyle, this is Agent Zeke Tran from the FBI. I’m calling from our field office in New York City.”
“What can I do for you, Agent Tran?”
Tran’s delivery was committed to memory. “We’re looking for a crime that for whatever reason hasn’t made it into the N-DEx. It would be a murder or attempted murder involving a large-caliber rifle, most probably a .300 Winchester Magnum. This crime would have happened within the last three years. It’s probable a law enforcement officer was the target; it’s probable that this crime took place in the winter months, most likely at dusk or dawn; it’s probable that the crime took place in extreme cold, maybe during inclement weather; it’s probable that the shooter used an elevated position. We’re looking for a long-distance shot, something that tables out beyond eight hundred yards. The shooter would have fired from a spot that wasn’t easy to find, and they would have left very little behind in the way of evidence. And it’s probable that the shooter used a unique type of ammunition—possibly armor-piercing.”
“Jesus,” Doyle said.
“What?”
There was silence for a few moments before the sheriff came back on with, “You got a crystal ball?”
59
Reuters
Late Saturday afternoon, the Islamic State’s news agency, Amaq, claimed that an arm of their organization positioned in France is responsible for orchestrating the murder of four law enforcement officers in New York City. The press release lacked the usual fundamentalist flair of earlier press releases, which was an earmark of the organization’s communiqués until the death of their propaganda chief, Wa’il Adil Hasan Salman al-Fayad, also known as Dr. Wa’il, who was killed in a U.S.-led coalition airstrike on September 7, 2016.
“The attack on law enforcement peoples [sic] in New York City was carried out by an Islamic State fighter. More deaths are to follow. God is great,” the release in Amaq stated.
(Reporting by Milad Almasi, writing by Kenneth Dent, editing by Mary Ignatius)
Lucas sat in one of the ubiquitous conference rooms at the bureau offices with Kehoe, Graves, and Whitaker. He was watching Graves’s lips move, but he had stopped listening. Graves was going over an official press release from a faction of a fractured terrorist organization that had set up shop in one of the crumbling neighborhoods of the Middle East. They were loosely affiliated with ISIS and even more loosely affiliated with reality. And as far as Lucas could tell, the claims the group were making wer
e complete and absolute horseshit.
Graves was ticking off points and weighing in on merits. By the time he finished the communiqué, Lucas was ready to throw a chair through the window.
His irritation must have been evident, because Graves chimed in with, “You have something to add?”
Lucas took a breath and counted to three. “If this were their baby, they’d have claimed responsibility right after Hartke. Or warned of it coming.”
“What makes you say that?” Graves sounded like he was humoring a small child.
“Basic added PR value. This is a bang-for-the-buck organization. They know that going up against the FBI is a losing philosophy; it’s only a matter of time until they are caught, so getting in on the game at the earliest possible point garners the most publicity. But they didn’t claim it early because the first shooting could have been a single random act of run-of-the-mill, good old American firearm violence. They didn’t know a second killing was coming, or they would have said as much. All they know is that someone is killing people in a manner that fits well with their brand. Which was why they scrambled to get that letter together; it fits their narrative. It doesn’t matter if it turns out to be true; most Americans go nuts when you mention ISIS, even if they’re not a threat in any statistical way.”